This deer was startled to see us from a few feet away as we made our way back to the Pen Ponds car park.
I liked the ‘expression’ on the deer’s face and chose this image rather than the one of the others I had of the deer with a straight face.
Are you looking at me?
Judge’s comments
… well it is an o ‘deer’ kind of image, I can see why you picked it
… it is properly chewing which gives it this kind of deformed mouth arrangement which I am not sure that it adds to the strength of the image
…you have got this deer set amongst the ferns, in I don’t know, if we were in one of usual clubs it would be somewhere like Richmond Park
… you have captured [him] pretty well , eyes are nice and sharp , ears are sharp, you can see the fluff and fur inside the ears, , a little bit soft around the edges, and the face,
… I find this skewed mouth a little disconcerting, it is good bit I think if had got it looking ‘normal’, I mean the mouth square on as opposed to being offset to the left it would have been better
The scores
There were 19 images in this projected digital round in Division 1.
‘Are you looking at me?’ scored 8.
Alternative feedback
… liked the matching tones between the bracken and the deer
… perhaps a better title such as ‘wry grin’ or ‘what am I chewing’ might have helped the judge to consider the image as a specific selection by the author
… you need to take a look at the deer’s nose, perhaps should have been mentioned
The original image
I did quite a bit of post processing on this image. The most important was to alter the colour temperature from 4100 to just over 6000. Then I used spot removal to get rid of the bright distractions behind the deer. Adjusting vibrance and saturation helped and then I experimented with different crops. One or two of which made it out onto social media.
For the competition I cropped even closer and added luminance smoothing, adjusted the saturation and worked on the background to reduce distractions even more.
Here are some more images from our visit to Richmond Park in October 2019.